Automatic testing and sorting system has big potential market, it could be used in sorting of cylindrical batteries such as 18650 Notebook batteries and prismatic power batteries including EV and energy storage batteries. And it also could be used in sorting process for some other products which need to be tested & sorted.
At present, the manual sorting technology is pretty mature in the industry. Most of battery manufactures need a lot of workers to operate testing equipment manually during their battery sorting, or combine manual and semi-automatic testing equipment in the sorting process. These operations do not have much automation with high labor cost, low efficiency, low accuracy and inconsistence. The quality requirement of products is hard to meet.
In order to automate the sorting process, specifically-built sorting machine has been invented and used. However, the hard automation machine is costly, lack of flexibility therefore hard to be popular in the industry. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,781,344 discloses a battery testing and sorting apparatus. Batteries are fed to a conveyor by a battery feeding section disposed along the length of the conveyor, the batteries are tested by a testing section disposed along the length of the conveyor upstream from the feeding section, and are sorted by a sorting section disposed along the length of the conveyor upstream from the testing section. The battery testing and sorting apparatus is for continuously sorting large quantity of batteries into groups based on the electrical condition of the batteries. This invention is inflexible because it requires the batteries to be positioned on a conveyor that sequentially passes by the feeding section, the testing section and the sorting section disposed along the length of the conveyor. This is an inflexible configuration of the elements of the battery testing and sorting apparatus that defeats its adaptability to various shapes of mounting space. Additionally, the process of feeding, testing and sorting are incapable of performing in parallel. Furthermore, the invention provides no disclosure for programming a number of classification and parameters values for each group of batteries.
KR. Pat. No. 2005002233 discloses another battery testing and sorting apparatus for automatically sorting notebook battery cells in grades. This invention also requires batteries to be carried by the battery cell supply unit that moves in a path determined by the positions of a battery cell feeding unit, a battery cell inspection unit, a battery cell sorting unit. This invention does not allow feeding, testing and sorting performed in parallel. And, the invention does not have the ability of programming the classification and parameters for each group of batteries.
Similar technical problems as above may also find in CN. Pat. 200988037 and CN. Pat. 201239720.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,674,287 is another example of a battery testing device directed to measuring the impedance spectrum of unit cells in a predetermined frequency region at the same temperature and state of charge. This invention is limited to testing whether two or more cells having the smallest difference in the impedance spectrum for battery pack and does not have the ability to sort batteries into additional groups, nor is there any need given in the intended venting purpose of this invention. As such, the invention is incapable of sorting batteries into a plurality groups based on their electrical conditions.